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Featured Short Films
The chief viewing focus of Act One will always be the official monthly film selections, a complete history of which can be viewed here.
However, in addition to viewing great feature-length works, each month a notable short film is also shared with the group for further discussion. The selected short film for the current month can be viewed on this page, and a complete history of all previous selections is listed below.
July 2019 (Summer Serials)
Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet and Thomas Carr
Vincent (1982)
Directed by Tim Burton
Curfew (2012)
Directed by Shawn Christensen
A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune) (1902)
Directed by Georges Méliès
The Lunch Date (1990)
Directed by Adam Davidson
Black Angel (1980)
Directed by Roger Christian
Bonus Short: Pre Vis Action (2016)
Directed by Gareth Evans
06/16 (Summer Serials)
Directed by Alan James & Ray Taylor
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940)
Directed by Ford Beebe & Ray Taylor
The Shadow (1940)
Directed by James W. Horne
Copy Shop (2001)
Directed by Virgil Widrich
Alma (2009)
Directed by Rodrigo Blaas
Bonus Short: Tuck Me In (2014)
Directed by Ignacio F. Rodo
The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge) (1956)
Directed by Albert Lamorisse
Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life (1993)
Directed by Peter Capaldi
Bonus Short: Treevenge (2008)
Directed by Jason Einsene
7:35 in the Morning (7:35 de la Mañana) (2003)
Directed by Nacho Vigalondo
My Home (Chez moi) (2014)
Directed by Phuong Mai Nguyen
The Grandmother (1970)
Directed by David Lynch
The Pavement (2015)
Directed by Taylor Engel
Black Rider (Schwarzfahrer) (1992)
Directed by Pepe Danquart
Bonus Short: Soft (2007)
Directed by Simon Ellis
Spy Smasher (1942)
Directed by William Witney
The Phantom Empire (1935)
Directed by Otto Brower & B. Reeves Eason
Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938)
Directed by Ford Beebe & Robert F. Hill
Stutterer (2015)
Directed by Benjamin Cleary
Bonus Short: Valse (2013)
Directed by Chris Keller
Geometria (1987)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Bonus Short: The Resurrection of Broncho Billy (1970)
Directed by James Rokos
Next Floor (2008)
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Tanghi Argentini (2006)
Directed by Guy Thys
Dinner for One; or, The 90th Birthday (Der 90. Geburtstag) (1963)
Directed by Heinz Dunkhase
Hotel Chevalier (2007)
Directed by Wes Anderson
Sunspring (2016)
Directed by Oscar Sharp
Trevor (1994)
Directed by Peggy Rajski
Bonus Short: In a Heartbeat (2017)
Directed by Esteban Bravo & Beth David
Room 8 (2013)
Directed by James W. Griffiths
Directed by Frederick Stephani
The Green Hornet (1940)
Bonus Short: Un Chien Andalou (1929)
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941)
Directed by William Witney & John English
The Postcard (2007)
Directed by Josh Kim
The Sandman (1991)
Directed by Paul Berry
Blind Vaysha (2016)
Directed by Theodore Ushev
Bonus Short: Rejected (2000)
Directed by Don Hertzfeldt
In God We Trust (2000)
Directed by Jason Reitman
Mount Head (Atama Yama) (2002)
Directed by Koji Yamamura
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Directed by Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid
Instead of Abracadabra (2008)
Directed by Patrik Eklund
Two Cars, One Night (2004)
Directed by Taika Waititi
Bonus Short: What We Do in the Shadows: Interviews with Some Vampires (2005)
Directed by Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi
Late Afternoon (2017)
Directed by Louise Bagnall
Directed by Lambert Hillyer
Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet & Thomas Carr


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Q: How to do CKAN custom development? I am new to CKAN. I am not sure if any custom code that I need to add any new functionalities has to be implemented as CKAN extensions.

A: Yes, writing a CKAN extension is the recommended way to add custom code to CKAN. We're currently working on a new tutorial for writing extensions, you can find the draft tutorial here: https://github.com/okfn/ckan/pull/943

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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A life of law and flight
Justin Green '84
"Losing my father suddenly at 16 made me appreciate that life goes on after a loss. The financial compensation that I obtain for my clients means that maybe they won't need to move out of their home, that tuitions will be paid and that the life the decedent wanted for her or his family will happen."
MAJOR: Economics
CURRENT POSITION: Attorney, Kreindler & Kreindler (N.Y.)
Justin Green '84 grew up in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. His mother was a school teacher, until Green's older sister was born and then she worked at home. His father, who was a doctor, died on Green's 16th birthday.
The unexpected loss took a toll, emotionally and financially. "We sold our house, moved into a small apartment and my mother went back to work," Green said.
Now a successful attorney with leading aviation law firm Kreindler & Kreindler (N.Y.), Green represents families in major airplane disasters. His own experience with tragedy has given him an intimate understanding of what his clients are going through.
"Losing my father suddenly at 16 made me appreciate that life goes on after a loss," he said. "The financial compensation that I obtain for my clients means that maybe they won't need to move out of their home, that tuitions will be paid and that the life the decedent wanted for her or his family will happen."
Green's major cases include the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001; the Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 disaster near Amsterdam, Netherlands; and the Hudson River midair collision near Hoboken, N.J.
But his most challenging was the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March 2014.
"The key evidence in aviation cases is the airplane wreckage. This includes cockpit voice and digital flight data recorders, commonly called 'black boxes,' even though they're bright orange," Green said. "Until the main wreckage is found and the black boxes are recovered, the disappearance of the flight and the 239 souls on board will remain the greatest aviation mystery in history."
Also a CNN aviation analyst and military pilot, Green's unique career path began at a Union College job fair, where the economics major struck up a conversation with a Marine Corps recruiter. Green later was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in Jackson Gardens during graduation weekend in June 1984.
From 1990-91, Green was as an attack helicopter pilot in Operations Desert Shield and Storm. While serving in the Marines, he was in two accidents: a crash landing of a commercial passenger jet and a fiery helicopter crash. This sparked his interest in aviation safety and Green later graduated from the Aviation Safety Officer's program at the Naval Postgraduate School, and served as his squadron's aviation safety officer.
He then graduated from Fordham Law School and for the past 20 years has devoted his professional life to advocating for aviation disaster victims.
"I have been fortunate in my career as an aviation lawyer," Green said. "My time as a Marine Corps pilot and aviation safety officer provided technical training and experience that I use every day as a lawyer."
"The plaintiff, in most cases, bears the burden of proving why an airplane or helicopter crashed and who is responsible in order to win the case," he continued. "I do a pre-litigation investigation, which includes examining the airplane's wreckage and its black boxes.
"I take defense witness testimony under oath. I use many different experts—accident recreation experts, pilot experts, metallurgists or material scientists, and engine and airframe experts. A case may take two or more years to go through discovery and go to trial depending on its complexity."
It is work he's proud of.
"In almost all my cases, families have lost loved ones," Green said. "They want answers about what caused the crashes and want to make sure that no other families suffer the same fate. They deserve justice and I'm honored when these families trust me to represent their causes."
More alumni profiles »
A magazine for alumni and friends
MAGAZINE HOMEPAGE
External News Source
Union College, Winter 2017 issue

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Bangkok - Chiang Mai - Siem Reap - Ho Chi Minh by Air
Bangkok - Chiang Rai - Chiang Mai - Phuket - Siem Reap by Air
Bangkok - Luang Prabang - Vientiane - Siem Reap - Singapore by Air
Bangkok - Hanoi - Ho Chi Minh by Air
Ho Chi Minh - Hanoi - Siem Reap - Bangkok by Air
Home | Thailand
8 to 12+ Nights from $1,088*
This sample price: priced within the past 7 days for arrival on Monday, April 13, 2020, departure from Los Angeles Intl, CA. Choose your own departure city and dates.
Stunning Experience!!! Begin this fabulous trip flying into Bangkok, The `Venice of the east`, visit Bangkok's most important landmarks including Grand Palace, Wat Pho and Wat Arun. Do not miss to experience exceptional shopping at Chatuchak Weekend Market, one of the world's largest weekend markets where you will be able to buy just anything. The trip continues in Chiang Mai The Rose of the North`, famous for its history, culture and ancient temples, a city nestled into the foothills of northern Thailand where the landscape is picturesque and out of a postcard. Then escape to Siem Reap, a strikingly memorable place that will take you back on time and offer you a pick of the ancient Khmer civilization thanks to their many Angkor temples. Finally fly into Ho Chi Minh City commonly known as Saigon and visit their internationally known Jade Emperor Pagoda, which is one of the most spectacularly atmospheric temples of this area. What a combination!.
This is a flexible package with daily departures from anywhere in the USA or Canada. Choose your length of stay. Pick your own flights, hotels and activities.
Flight into Bangkok and out of Ho Chi Minh City
Hotel for 2 nights in Bangkok
Flight Bangkok - Chiang Mai
Hotel for 2 nights in Chiang Mai
Flight Chiang Mai - Siem Reap
Hotel for 2 nights in Siem Reap
Flight Siem Reap - Ho Chi Minh City
Hotel for 2 nights in Ho Chi Minh City
Bangkok - Chiang Rai - Chiang Mai - Phuket - Siem Reap by Air; Bangkok - Luang Prabang - Vientiane - Siem Reap - Singapore by Air; Bangkok - Hanoi - Ho Chi Minh by Air; more >>
Bangkok (135) Ho Chi Minh City -Saigon- (35) Chiang Mai (34) Siem Reap (50)
1. Bangkok
(238 hotels)
2. Chiang Mai
3. Siem Reap
4. Ho Chi Minh City -Saigon-
2 nights in Bangkok
Bangkok the vibrant capital of Thailand is considered one of the top tourist destinations in the world and hosts millions of visitors each year. A cosmopolitan, modern city that is full of contrast and also recognized as one of the friendliest cities in the world for the hospitality, grace and nature of the Thai people. Featuring some of the country`s most visited historical venues with awe inspiring architecture, gleaming temples and spectacular palaces. With its high rise skyline, luxury malls, extravagant hotels, street food stalls, massive markets, rooftop bars and restaurants, floating markets and risqué nightlife the city is filled with a variety of attractions for everyone.
Wat Arun (The Temple of Dawn), The Grand Palace, Floating Market, Temple of the Reclining Buddha (Wat Pho), Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Temple of the Golden Buddha (Wat Traimit), Jim Thompson House, The Golden Mount (Wat Saket), Khao San Road, Chao Phraya River and so much more!
2 nights in Chiang Mai
Chiang Mai Is the Rose of the North a unique and exotic city with a fascinating indigenous cultural history, the Old city is surrounded by the ruins of the old walls and a moat, nestled amongst the jungles and stupendous mountains which are home to the hill tribes. The region is filled with magnificent wildlife, spectacular scenery and exotic flora that can be observed in its National Parks.
Wat Chedi Luang, Doi Suthep, Wat Phrathat, Wiang Kum Kam (Underground Ancient City), Chiang Mai Night Bazaar, Doi Inthananon National Pak, Karen Long Neck Tribes and so much more!
2 nights in Siem Reap
Siem Reap the city that features the world famous Angkor Wat monument and hundreds of other ancient temples making it a growing tourist destination. This fascinating city features colonial style architecture and delectable authentic Khmer cuisine. The streets are filled with vibrant markets boasting art, handicraft, souvenirs and tasty street snacks. The famed Pub Street stretches for a mile packed with restaurants, bars, and a lively nightlife. Experience the lifestyle of the fishermen and their families who live in floating villages on the Tonle Sap Lake surrounded by nature and wildlife.
Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Phare Ponleu Selpak, Tonle Sap Lake, Banteay Srei, Banteay Srei, Bayon Temple, Baphuon Temple, Ta Prohm Temple and so much more!
2 nights in Ho Chi Minh City -Saigon-
Ho Chi Minh or Saigon is nestled on the banks of the Saigon River, Vietnam`s largest city with a rich cultural heritage boasting classic French colonial architecture, incense-infused temples, ornate pagodas and sleek modern skyscrapers this spectacular city offers so much to be discovered. Wander the tree line boulevards and streets filled with markets and delicious street food. Marvel at the historical buildings such as Saigon Notre Dame Basilica, the Central Post Office, and Ho Chi Minh Square.
Reunification Palace, Central Post Office, Saigon River, Saigon Notre Dame Basilica, Vinh Nghiem Pagoda, Jade Emperor Pagoda, War Remnants Museum, Fine Arts Museum and so much more!
Arrive to Bangkok
Overnight in Bangkok 238 hotels offered
Optional 181 Things to do
Departing from Bangkok
Arrive to Chiang Mai
Overnight in Chiang Mai 72 hotels offered
Departing from Chiang Mai
Arrive to Siem Reap
Overnight in Siem Reap 122 hotels offered
Departing from Siem Reap
Ho Chi Minh City -Saigon-
Arrive to Ho Chi Minh City -Saigon-
Overnight in Ho Chi Minh City -Saigon- 65 hotels offered
Departing from Ho Chi Minh City -Saigon-
Bangkok Hotels (238 total)
Chiang Mai Hotels (72 total)
Siem Reap Hotels (122 total)
Ho Chi Minh City -Saigon- Hotels (65 total)
Tours in Bangkok (181 total)
Tours in Chiang Mai (102 total)
Tours in Siem Reap (298 total)
Tours in Ho Chi Minh City -Saigon- (225 total)
Cambodia is perhaps one of the least known destinations in South East Asia. Any visit to Cambodia should definitely include a visit to its capital, Phnom Penh, a city renowned for its beauty. The key tourist attraction of the country is 'Angkor Wat Archeological Park' near the northern town of Siem Reap. The nearly 900-year-old temple of Angkor Wat, along with some 100 other temples, such as 'The Bayon' and 'Ta Prom', are described as the jewel of the country. Other tourist destinations are Kampong Som on the South Coast where you can relax, sunbathe and snorkel and Battambang, the second largest city of the country, offerering a fine line of colonial buildings.
Thailand is one of the most visited countries in Asia because of its rich diversity of cultures and traditions. With its history, lively arts, beautiful beaches, friendly people and one of the best cuisines in the world, the Kingdom is a never-ending source of fascination for international visitors. The Northeast area hosts some lovely forested mountains and national parks. The major highlight is probably the famous Khao Yai national park, but other interesting places in this area are Nong khai and Surin. In the south the traveler can relax at some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, for example, Koh Tao, Krabi, Koh Samui or Phuket or Trang.
Entry/ Health/ Safety
Vietnam is a country with a long history, ancient traditions and rich in culture. It has many historic sights, old temples and inspiring landscapes. Vietnam's most beautiful region is Halong bay, meaning 'descending dragon'. With over 3,000 oddly shaped limestone islets, the natural beauty of the grottoes is captivating. Another highlight is the city of Hue, the ancient capital of the Annamese - located about halfway between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. For those who love nature, a visit to northwest Vietnam is a 'Must'.
128 Customer Feedbacks
Sample Itinerary | Neighborhoods | FAQ | Getting Around | Best Time To Visit | Tipping in Thailand
Sample Itinerary | Neighborhoods | FAQ | Getting Around | Tipping in Cambodia | When to Go
Sample Itinerary | Hotel Zones | FAQ | Getting Around | Best Time To Visit | Tipping in Vietnam


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NewsEntertainmentTaylor Swift becomes the first artist in US chart history to have...
Taylor Swift becomes the first artist in US chart history to have 7 albums sell more than 500K copies in a week
American pop singer Taylor Swift just created history with her new album Folklore, which released a week ago. She becomes the first artist in US music chart history to have seven albums, which sold more than 500,000 copies in a single week.
Folklore was streamed for over 80 million times on Spotify on the day of release, which is the highest figure for any female artist ever. Taylor Swift written and recorded the whole album during the global pandemic. The album was released through the Republic Records.
ALSO READ: BTS V's song Sweet Night tops iTunes chart in 114 countries, sets world record
It was a complete surprise for her fans. Folklore consist of 16 songs. The album received huge amount of praise by everyone. It sold 2 million copies in its first week globally, 1.3 million of which were sold on its first day.
As per the BBC report, Folklore not just only topped the US Billboard chart but it also reached the No. 1 spot in the UK, Belgium, Australia, Finland, Norway and New Zealand. Folklore's first week records were achieved of downloads and streams only.
Folklore was so secret that even Republic Records employees were unaware of its existence until hours before its release. The album will see a sales boost this week as predicted by experts. More copies of Folklore will be available at the end of this week.
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As Dan Mitchell has been reminding us, UCOP has appointed a Task Force to implement the Regents agreement to reduce pension benefits for future employees. As a result of the Committee of Two, UCOP has agreed to lower the amount of employee salary that can be counted towards UCRP to approximately $117,000. They are proposing that some form of hybrid defined benefit/defined contribution plan be created to allow employees to save above that $117,000 limit. UCOP is also proposing that an all-defined contribution (DC) plan be developed that would allow future employees to opt out from the defined benefit plan entirely.
UCOP insists that the "New retirement benefits options are being developed as a result of the budget agreement between UC and state leaders, which included nearly $500 million to help pay down UC's unfunded pension liability." But there are several issues that need to be raised about this claim.
1. UCOP refers to the nearly $500M that the University will receive from the state in exchange for pension modification. But the University will have received only $96M upon the creation of the new pension tiers. I understand that the actual state budget promises only this one year of funding. Although President Napolitano and Governor Brown may have agreed on the larger number, there is no sign that the Legislature or its leadership have agreed. What future budgets will look like is always unclear. UCOP, in effect, is proposing a serious reduction in pensions for future employees in exchange for less than a third of the money they now estimate they will have to spend to complete UCPATH. Will their predictions for future state pension contributions be more accurate than their predictions on UCPATH?
2. There is no evidence that either the Governor or the Legislature asked that UC create an option for a stand-alone DC plan. Sacramento's concern had to do with the limits on the salary on which benefits could be accrued, which is consistent with its hostility to high levels of UC executive compensation. The notion that there needs to be a stand-alone DC plan appears to have emerged from UCOP or from some other source within UC. President Napolitano's justification for this proposal seems to be that it is what has happened in the private sector so it should happen at UC. But we should recognize that the shift in the private sector occurred not because of widely accepted actuarial proof that DC plans are better for employees but because they enabled businesses to shift the cost of retirement onto retirees. There was nothing natural or inevitable about it. It was not driven by a desire to stabilize or improve retirement security for employees.
In addition, you'll recall that the University engaged in a serious debate about this question only a few years ago and decided to retain its long-term commitment to a DB plan. Rather than appointing a task force to determine the best way to implement this new plan UCOP should engage in an open discussion about whether or not this is actually better for employees. There has not been, to my knowledge, any reason to think that the relative benefits of DB vs DC plans has changed in the last few years. If anything, the weight of the argument suggests that DC plans are worse for employees and may in fact be worse for employers. DC plans raise the fees on accounts, force employees to assume greater risk, and tie individual retirement fate even more closely to the stock market. From the vantage point of employers, DC plans increase fees and reduce incentives for employees to stay. There is also--despite assurances to the contrary from UCOP--the danger of ultimately undermining the the DB plan by leaving it an "orphan" plan--moving funds needed to sustain it over the long term into other more volatile directions.
3. Nearly two years ago, Colleen Lye and James Vernon documented the decline in the quality of UC faculty salaries and benefits. The 2014 Mercer Remuneration Study confirmed these findings (see slides 33-34 for a summary). UCOP's acceptance of the state's pension limits and even more so its eagerness to move away from a commitment to a DB plan simply accelerate this decline. Although I think that there are reasons to cap accrual salary in exchange for sufficient state-funding on an ongoing basis, this is not the deal that UCOP has achieved. And the policy drift towards the Defined Contribution plan is an entirely different matter. UCOP seems to be removing the conditions that promote loyalty to the institution and seeking to encourage faculty to consider UC a way-station rather than a home. It is the self-destructiveness of existing conventional wisdom at its most short-sighted.
The faculty, and the Senate as part of the faculty, needs to insist that the Task Force be empowered to decide--after wide-ranging discussion and employee consent--whether a DC plan is good for the university and employees. It should not be limited to deciding how to implement such a plan.
In other words, the Task Force needs to maximize the interests of future employees and not simply implement the practices of the private sector.
UPDATE: Dan Mitchell has now written a new post that very helpfully lays out the problems with "orphan" pension plans.
Labels: Admin Responses, Budget, California, Costs, Economy, Employee Benefits, Faculty, Income, Janet Napolitano, Jerry Brown, Pension, Politics, UC
The Democratic candidates public college plans are more interesting than most coverage has implied (brief comparisons are here). They are all variations of "Debt-Free College" proposals, to use candidate Martin O'Malley's term, structured in part as federal bailouts of state universities. They are grossly underfunded, but they establish new principles and could launch a new political struggle for public eduction reconstruction.
My suspicions thawed as I read through them. It's hard to work in the sector and not be excited that maybe the federal government will save public universities from their states. It's equally hard not to be excited about real reductions of student costs and student debt, which have led to U.S. attainment declines, the unjustifiable burdening of Millennials, and other assorted evils. More pressure to fix debt was added by a shocking St. Louis Fed report whose findings were summarized by the NYT coverage as "Racial Wealth Gap Persists Despite Degrees." The headline should have been, "Racial Wealth Gap Increased by Getting Degrees." Gaze at this figure for a while (from the original report--as already explained by Shapiro & Oliver twenty years ago):
College not only doesn't end racial stratification--it increases it.
So what are the chances of a fix? Bad for now, but better later.
The Obama Administration has been laying some groundwork: it just announced a revised "pay as you earn" (Repaye) plan, under which "Monthly loan payments for participants in the repayment program will be capped at 10 percent of their discretionary income. Any loan balance remaining after 20 years of payments will be forgiven." This will lead to big cuts in monthly payments for lower-income graduates--from $333 to $61 in the NYT article's example as well as de facto loan forgiveness.
The big new campaign announcement was the New College Compact, Hillary Clinton's battleship of a college plan that is trying to swamp Bernie Sanders' College for All sailboat with sheer tonnage of items addressed.
Mrs. Clinton's plan involves mostly breaks in interest payments on student loans (one-third of her total). Another chunk would go to an "innovation fund" for developing some non-college learning infrastructure and better information and enforcement of existing loan regulations (it's a hodge podge). Half of her new funds would go to grants to state colleges to offset tuition reductions, coupled with unspecified new quid pro quos about tuition and cost reduction. Her total is $350 billion over 10 years.
Bernie Sanders's plan is not so different, except it focuses less on cracking down on bad actors in the sector and has an annual total of $70 billion, or twice Mrs. Clinton's. There aren't yet a lot of details to sweat, though clearly Mr. Sanders's figure is much closer to the price tag that would make free public college a reality. Mr. O'Malley lacks details but has the most heartfelt rhetoric.
There are a few general issues worth mentioning.
First, the political center on public colleges has moved. It has moved left, away from letting "market forces" continue to pile up student costs and student debt. Free community college has been endorsed by the US President. Free 4 year college is now on its heels. In almost no time, politicians like Mr. O'Malley have started to write, "today, our kids aren't getting the same bargain that my dad did" as the new common sense. Bob Samuels has pointed out that a couple of years ago his book Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free made him a "lone, crazy voice in the wilderness." Now "free" is a respectable part of the mainstream debate.
Second, we're witnessing not just a changing political balance but a paradigm shift. The Democratic college plans try to (1) lower debt payments by (2) reducing public college tuition so that less debt is incurred in the first place. They propose to do this by (3) giving federal money directly to state colleges to offset lost tuition income and (4) forcing state legislatures to stop cutting higher ed and even rebuild its funding. Jordan Weismann has a helpful summary of the new Democratic consensus.
This combination of elements is a very big deal. It would roll back our de facto federal voucher program for college students in which non-research federal money goes to students who turn it over to the school of their choice in the form of tuition. Many or most states will fight this as they fought Obamacare, and for the same reason--expanding a public service they don't like with new federal money that requires a cost share from them. There will be blood. But we have hit a milestone that might remind some people of the road to Medicare, which established the public-good principle for full health care coverage in retirement, which then made accomplishment the responsibility of public funding.
The third issue is that tuition increases for resident B.A. students are going to stay off the political table. Of course in the short or even medium run, politicians won't actually replace tuition revenues with public funding increases. This is bad news for public U operating budgets, and this is no doubt why short-termers at public universities are preemptively denouncing free tuition. It's good news to people like me who want to see the case for the public funding become politically cheaper by making the case for constant tuition increases politically more expensive. The intellectual and ethical arguments for the public side are there, and now their political price is coming down.
Fourth, the senior managers who try to drift near the political center are going to miss it, since it has moved. That is what has been happening in California, where Janet Napolitano thought tuition increases had a few more years of political life than they actually did. Time's almost up for non-resident tuition increases--there's maybe a year or two more before a major backlash against selling UC flagship seats to non-residents while redirecting residents to the campuses they didn't want. The new center is under active construction and it would be good for the heads of systems to be part of this, which they won't be if they spend their time fighting it.
Fifth, the Democrat's means won't achieve their alleged ends. The candidates still propose no-new-taxes positions. They want to pay for the biggest change in university policy in a couple of generations with marginal revenues: the reduction of rich folks' income tax deductions (Mrs. Clinton); a Tobin tax on financial transactions (Mr. Sanders). Both are good ideas for general policy reasons. Neither offers either sufficient money to buy off the states or the deeper principle that would build public support.
That deeper principle is the public-good value of having a very large number of unindebted people with bachelors degrees. A related principle is that the most efficient way to pay for a public good is with general taxes. You want to increase a public good's consumption (e.g., vaccinations), not ration it with a market price system or carve the revenues up with banks and other providers in an orgy of profit-taking. Everyone can understand this public-good argument if US politicians actually make the argument. The Democrats lost their momentum 40 years ago when they stopped making it, and they won't recover politically until they do--and they may end up giving it to a resurgent third party instead.
So what does this encouraging shift in national politics have to do with Phyllis Wise, the recently resigned-fired-not fired-resigned chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign? She emblemized old-school corporate management that will keep a federal fix away.
There has been plenty of coverage of the most recently turmoil in what has been a bad year for UI brass, culminating in Dr. Wise's resignation that became a firing that became a resignation again. Corey Robin offers the definitive incredulous untangling of last week's events, in which Phyllis Wise resigned, had her resignation rejected by the Board so they could fire her, which led her to threaten them with further disclosure in an email that was followed by a second resignation letter, which this time was accepted. A sample of Prof. Robin's breakdown:
1. Salaita is hired but then is told, no, you're not really hired, so that he can be fired. Wise is forced to resign, but then is told, no, you're not really resigned, so that she can be fired.
2. Wise complains that not only is she the victim of a university administration that puts politics above principles and reneges on its contracts with its employees—all true, by the way—but that such actions are also "unprecedented."
3. Suddenly, the UI Board of Trustees is concerned about contracts with its employees. . ..
Suffice to say that no chicken has ever come so accurately home to roost.
But the deeper problem is the overall practice of management revealed by the initial firing of Steven Salaita and the subsequent lawsuit, discovery, email publication, and initial court decision affirming most of the Salaita counts. When the Board found out about Steven Salaita's angry tweets about Israel's Gaza attack last summer, they became completely obsessed with one of the 120 people who were being appointed as professors in the UI system--an associate professor from Virginia Tech that had been hired into a program I doubt any of them had ever heard of before. So there was the lack of an ability to maintain perspective, to set priorities, to decide what is important to the long-term health of the University and what is a side show.
Here we have a fiduciary body that is prone to impulsive politicization. Next, there's the will to intervention from above. The Board of Trustees translated a passionate conviction held by a small, powerful group into an overturning of an elaborately collaborative campus decision, in this case the hiring protocol that had been completed with an offer tended to Prof. Salaita and his acceptance of it. In its move to dismiss his lawsuit, the University claimed that they had never entered into a valid contract with Prof. Salaita, so no abusive intervention was made. In his thorough rejection of this claim, Judge Leinenweber describes various kinds of language that could have made clear the contract was contingent on the board, none of which was used, and then notes that appointment power had been delegated to deans. "If the deans had no authority to make any binding offers, the University would have been confused as to why 120 professors showed up to work when no one with actual authority had offered them a job" (19).
Similar judgments had been offered by a wide range of UIUC and other faculty a year ago, when the Board still had a chance to calm down and let the hire proceed. They ignored all of these. This second problem is the Board digging into an oppositional relation toward its own university community and internal processes, and the third is the routine insistence that "no mistakes were made."
There's a further set of bad management practices revealed in Chancellor Wise's emails about Prof. Salaita. There's the compulsive secrecy about the content and basis of deliberations and decisions, which are then routinely whitewashed in press releases. This has become so common that we hardly notice it anymore, but it means that the larger community lacks the information that would allow it to come to an informed judgment, which is supposed to be the whole point of universities. It also sinks executive groups into the epistemological blindness of their closed circle, which becomes inbred under pressure.
In the Salaita case, senior officials had agreed that he had in fact been hired, was joining the UIUC faculty, and should be subjected to an unpleasant tongue-lashing from Chancellor Wise when he arrived. They sometime between 7:25 am and 1:55 pm on July 24, 2014, they undecided this and shifted to blocking an appointment they now claimed had never been made. There seems to have been pressure from heavyweight donors that the UIUC administration failed to deflect--another management issue of a lack of independence towards outside interests that are increasingly plutocratic.
The decision must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it meant suppressing the history of the administration's view that he was hired, which they had held as recently as that morning. It meant running with an unconvincing rationale for unhiring Prof. Salaita that subjected them to widespread scorn and the campus to a national boycott, and all for nothing, since their position has now been thrown out of court. What had happened, to quote from another context, was that "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy." The academic world sensed this at the time, but could not prove it, and it was endlessly denied in the administration's public relations campaign that has now been shown to be founded on a lie. This has had very bad consequences for Steven Salaita, but also for the University of Illinois. Complex organizations thrive or decline by trust and goodwill, which underwrite their powers of collaboration.
The Wise Affair may seem like an anomaly or a day at the office in the rough and tumble of state politics. So Dr. Wise was trading Steven Salaita for Board chair Christopher Kennedy's support for her College of Medicine proposal, in John K. Wilson's valuable reading of the email record: what did you expect?
My point is that we have to expect much better. We have to build better academic governance at the state level or the federal bailout will either never happen, or never work. To do this, we'll have to face the fact that the CEO model has failed for universities: to invoke Thorstein Veblen's critique of business reason, the CEO must above all make the sale, and making the sale often requires hiding the truth.
You may think public universities have been muddling through pretty well with this marketing approach most of the time. I'm sorry to say that you would be wrong. Exhibit A is a quarter-century of declining public funding. Exhibit B is a long list of administrative sins that legislatures trot out to refuse meaningful restorations. Nothing is more likely to block federal solutions than state government's deep distrust of senior university leaders.
University of Illinois folk have made good reform suggestions (eg. Kirstin Wilcox, Michael Rothberg, Martin F. Manalansan IV and Ellen Moodie), all of which involve something we thought we had-- an open university, freestyle discussion, and bottom-up forms of planning. These moves towards active governance by faculty and staff are as important as the public funding policy changes. We won't get close even to the funding reforms of Hillary Clinton's unless we can get past the management model of Phyllis Wise.
Labels: Academic Freedom, Budget, Costs, Funding Model, Politics, Public Funding, Steven Salaita, Students
At his blog mainly macro, the economist Simon Wren-Lewis comments on how the Labour party members who like Jeremy Corbyn (at left) for his anti-austerity policies have been misdescribed as radical: "Talk to some, and being anti-austerity has become synonymous with being well to the left. Of course in reality it is just textbook macroeconomics, . . . [and in] 2009 . . . the need for fiscal stimulus rather than deficit reduction was the position advocated by a centre/left Labour party in the UK, and the Democrats in the US. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that among a relatively well informed electorate that is the Labour party membership an anti-austerity position is still seen as a sensible policy."
The explanation for mislabeling "sensible" as radical, Prof. Wren-Lewis writes, is that while most of the Labour base stayed where it was, the Very Serious People in Labour have moved to the right, in the direction of austerity.
Something similar happened long ago in public universities in North America. Senior managers and governing boards adopted a view that had previously been confined to conservative think tanks and political subcultures, which was that voters now saw a bachelor's degree as a private good, meaning that "the era of public funding was over." This view became VSP common sense, and public funding has never recovered. The two halves of that last sentence are related. There isn't a simple linear causal link between assuming austerity and receiving it, but the belief facilitates the practice. VSP and voter preferences diverge, as Larry M. Bartels has shown, and austerity politics are more popular with the former.
For those late to the party, I'll retell a UC example. In the spring of 2007, an aide to the Board of Regents chair gave me a friendly hallway lecture at a UC Board of Regents meeting on the end of public funding just after I'd spoken on the need to rebuild public funding. This was a year and a half before the 2008 crisis hit, so the austerity paradigm was not tied to economic conditions. Austerity was also not tied to financial rationality: UC's budget was still in trouble from the 2002-05 cuts, as I had just been explaining on behalf of the Academic Senate, and it has not re-stabilized since. But the austerity paradigm was tied to many kinds of regental convenience, starting with its use as an excuse for political passivity. The aide was using the "end of public funding" to tell me why the Board would ignore the Senate's formal recommendation that they request a funding increment that would get UC back on its 2000-01 funding track.
I don't enjoy recalling this story, but I sometimes do because it was the moment I belatedly realized that our post-public, austerity-UC was the operating assumption within the University leadership itself.
We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a "new normal" that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests. The results have been predictable. A recent report concluded that "forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession."
It's worth noting that the mechanism that entrenched austerity at public universities was similar to Prof. Wren-Lewis's description of Labour party shift. We had a widely accepted if rarely argued notion that universities mostly produce public benefits with a high non-market value (public knowledge through research, complex intellectual development through mass quality instruction, deep learning for good jobs). This implied the need for strong public funding and low private costs, meaning no or low tuition. This was the "sensible" position that was still out there as austerity was digging in. But the end-of-public-funding folks did not stage debates where people could show up. There were no venues for defending the public good position and opposing the others, no time and energy to discover and fight what Foucault called the micropolitics that transform institutions and governance itself. One day voters woke up to find that their common sense has become oppositional or even radical not because general opinions changed but because the leadership consensus drifted right.
So the question then and now was, how should regular citizens and employees respond? Permanent austerity's many tangible effects continue to unfold. Some are hard to measure, like reductions in grad and undergrad educational quality. Some are easy to measure, like the reductions in the value of employee pension and health benefits that we've seen at UC and elsewhere. These effects are controlled by the VSP austerity paradigm against which all "saltwater" economists rail, to no avail.
Long ago, Albert O. Hirschman outlined canonical responses to situations like this.
1. Loyalty. This means accepting the new normal as normal and getting on with things--writing the grants, grading the papers, reviewing the files etc. in familiar competent ways. In the short term this keeps things going, so it works if the problem is temporary. If it's not a temporary problem, loyalty makes the problem worse by failing to search for a solution and sometimes obstructing or marginalizing those who do.
2. Exit. Employees quit the organization or a specific unit. They can modify this to "neglect," in which they stay in place but minimize their contribution to an organization they no longer like or feel at home in. Exit can provide lots of information about conditions at a university. The examples that receive press coverage are usually departures of large STEM labs (from UCSD to Rice in 2011, from UCLA to USC in 2013, from UCSD to USC this year, in a case that has already been in court). One of the PIs who went to Rice said that their group was fleeing the effects of the "support gap" between public and private universities around the country. This resource gap is a critical problem that is already affecting the role of public research universities in the country's science ecosystem (I go into some detail here). Someone whose work is endangered by such shortfalls will look to see whether senior managers are addressing the problem directly, and have any hope of solving it. If they don't see these things, they are more likely to leave.
3. Lawsuits. Albert Hirschman didn't name this, but Jerry Brown has. It works for individual remedies but not so much for collective ones.
4. Voice. This covers a whole range of efforts to fix the larger system, from departmental retreats to faculty blogging to committee and commission service to regents' meeting protests and much much more. Within voice we can identify a few major styles.
One is politicization, as when people try to discredit school "reform" by tracing it to anti-union ideologies and to money provided by foundations or people who are anti-union; or UC Regents' austerity policies by tracing them to their largely plutocratic status. Whatever one thinks of it, this mode is hard to use in the situation we're in now, which has been nicely described by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson as policy drift.
Policy drift has some basic features. It is marked by a new normal that was not openly debated before it was announced as true or irreversible or both. Second, the new normal is established by a series of small, technical, and/or disguised compromises that are driven by one party and supported by the opposition party. In the case of tax and service cuts, the Democrats have served as the enabling opposition: they don't share the theory (public services hurt prosperity) but they co-author the practice (austerity).
Third, the post-facto debate that is triggered by the general discovery of a new normal like austerity, which most affected people don't actually want, is confined or neutralized by the bipartisan consensus that produced it. When Democratic regents are as convinced as Republicans that the era of public funding is over, discussion of a reversal will not get beyond the complaining stage.
Similarly, it's hard to have an open discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of UC privatization when the mere use of the term is opposed by senior university officials who are progressive Democrats. Drift brings endless lamentation and "tough choices" that don't fix anything, but it can't be stopped by logic and evidence.
Another example is the tenure issue I've been writing about (Inside Higher Ed and Remaking): there was no popular shift in the land away from "just cause" employment--the core principle of tenure--and toward at-will firing. The shift took place among decision-makers in a wide range of sectors across the country for various economic and political reasons. And yet the bipartisan forms of support for academic tenure make it harder to make the more general case for just-cause employment that would solidify public support. The default situation is that at-will firing will remain the norm, and academic tenure will stay an endangered exception.
Yet another example of policy drift: defined benefit (DB) pensions used to be seen as a sensible provision for low-cost retirement security. Then decades of counter argumentation--brought to us by the financial services industry, market economists, and pension raiders--redefined DB pensions as an expensive luxury that employees didn't deserve. Most people didn't change their minds about the enormous value of a safe retirement, or embrace philosophical critiques of DB pensions as the best means to that end. They succumbed to get-rich stories, various financial incentives, and a general sense of inevitability created by a long series of technical compromises.
The University of California still has a DB pension. In the midst of the Great Recession, the Academic Senate and the UC Commission on the Future reaffirmed its efficiency for employees and its value to the University (in attracting and retaining top faculty and staff, and in encouraging a large, unquantifiable loyalty effort from them). But recently President Napolitano has been bargaining bits of it away--there will be a cap on accrual, and now she has defined as inevitable a non-DB tier for new employees. The latter apparently came not from the state (which does want the salary cap) but from UCOP. An indirect explanation appeared in a newspaper.
"This is where the pension world is moving, and for public institutions, it makes a lot of sense," Napolitano told The Sacramento Bee editorial board in May. "It's much more portable, so for many people that will be an attraction. There are lots of gives and takes in all of this."
This is indeed "where the pension world is moving"--for the VSPs who control pension policy. It is not where the pension world is moving when that includes the people who pay into pensions. People didn't change their mind about the value of DB pensions and demand a new portability even with a lower and less-secure benefit. But some VSPs did. The pension world that includes financial analysts now also worries about a Baby Boomer retirement crisis, and some of them are calling for a return to formula-based pension pools. But the absence of an inclusive, evidence-based discussion before the decision is allowing UCOP to restructure UC employee retirement and health benefits slowly, boiling-frog style. (I understand that UC unions are opposing the new DC tier, as are the Faculty Associations. Where is the Academic Senate?)
My point here is that policy drift is great at keeping an opposition from forming. It is better at this than open ideological warfare. The upshot is that academic "voice" strategies have to adapt themselves to policy drift. To wit, voice will need to:
(A) Show how a particular policy is the product of drift, meaning that it is neither necessary nor intellectually coherent nor inherently stable (its maintenance requires lots of effort and money).
(B) Show how the policy drift detracts from working life and overall well-being. People won't get involved in organizational redesign unless it will make a difference to their working lives.
(C) Accept the enormous amount of effort required to dislodge a "drift" consensus. For example, the education economist Walter McMahon has confronted the private-good drift by writing a fantastically detailed four-hundred page book to show that private market benefits are a fraction (at most one-third) of the total, most of which is non-market and/or public benefit, such that the current market framework will cause society to underinvest in universities. Of course the book wasn't enough to break the paradigm. The media's reduction of a B.A.'s value to lifetime wage increments continues without a break, which means that many more people need to give Prof. McMahon a hand.
(D) Address the consensus on the basis of professional ethics and expertise. A familiar example is Paul Krugman: his column today says the Republicans "can't be serious," not because they are conservative but because they have stuck themselves with "crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy." Prof. Krugman writes as though politics must be intelligent and that it is his professional obligation to hold it to standards of argument and evidence. He's right. Faculty and staff should do the same in relation to institutional policy. The founding principles are fundamental: the right to professional self-definition; the obligation to articulate the ethics of one's professional practice; the obligation to act on them.
(E) Create a counter narrative, an alternative paradigm. In the absence of clear framing principles, continuously advanced, debated, and rearticulated by faculty and staff, the senior managers of any organization will naturally respond to the demands of powerful actors inside and outside the institution. Governor Brown, various party leaders, influential business people, the most senior faculty et al. always outweigh the assembled faculty and staff--unless there is a strong culture or guiding ethos as critical theorist Amanda Anderson uses the term. The silence of the faculty means the politicization of the administration. Only an articulated ethos can hold the parts together.
(F) Build what the artist Céline Condorelli calls a support structure for building these counter narratives. Departments or Senates or unions could sponsor working groups focused on addressing specific problems created by drift. A better idea would be free-standing centers not tied to existing units. Professors Ann Bermingham and Catherine Cole hosted a "charette" that brought faculty, administrators, and senate leaders together for several days. It was a strong start on a process that needs to happen regularly over time to build trust, common terms, have long drawn-out fights, and evolve new ideas into systems and practices.
Another example: the education anthropologist Susan Wright once got a large grant to fund a UK research center (the Centre for Sociology, Anthropology, and Politics) whose "approach [was] to try and create 'space' for staff and students, in the midst of fast-moving changes in Higher Education, to reflect on their own values, aspiration and practices, and determine their own agendas for developing their learning and teaching." The center re-granted to groups to set up discussion and decision processes. The goal--this is me projecting a bit--was to take the values, expectations, and practices of particular groups and articulate them into an ethos. Such a project has to be bottom-up: the UC Commission on the Future didn't change the paradigm as it had hoped because it was top-down and therefore intellectually narrow.
I realize what a hassle this sounds like. I too had always wanted a job where there wouldn't be too many meetings. But the alternative to having open, long form debates and getting our everyday practices into full public view is what we have now: unending policy drift.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article25517704.html#storylink=cpy
Labels: Austerity, Politics, Shared Governance, Strategies & Goals
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